SOURCE: Anselment, Raymond A. “Rhetoric and the Dramatic Satire of Martin Marprelate.” Studies in English Literature 10, no. 1 (winter 1970): 103-20.

In the following essay, Anselment examines Marprelate's treatment of rhetoric in the tracts.

In defining the illusive qualities which constitute the uniqueness of Martin Marprelate's satire, critics have stressed its affinity with theatrical tradition. Contemporary Elizabethans, irately opposed to Martin's blasphemous disregard for conventional methods of religious disputation, condemned him as a “stage plaier” whose behavior seemed a deliberate imitation of the popular jester Richard Tarlton.¹ Modern scholars, now acknowledging Martin among the first great English prose satirists, still emphasize his theatrical associations; Martin remains for them a disciple of Dick Tarlton, a “comic monologist” who “contrives to make the printed page produce comic effects that are theatrical in nature.”² These conclusions provide valuable bases for analyzing the dramatic nature of Marprelate's satire, but they tend to minimize an...